We have still not started doing anything about this. Is this soemthing we implement for 2.6 in stable S2_6 branch, or do we postpone it to 3.0?

> for any ruleset that departs radically from the norm.

This could be considered dependency for release-quality alien ruleset. Also the other way around, use of this probably needs to be demonstrated with alien ruleset before it gets other users. The alien ruleset has already been postponed to 3.0.

> I've no evidence of demand for this feature, it's just something
> that's occurred to me while rewriting the default helpdata.txt.

I'm not as experienced in attempts to make helpdata.txt ruleset agnostic as you, but I assume that it's not the way that would ever work (give all the required information in a sensible way, yet be correct with every ruleset) no matter how much we try. So yes, something like this is needed. Details to mitigate the problems you mention have to be considered carefully, but I think this should be in 2.6 (if not 2.5) roadmap.

An idea I've been toying with for a while. Has problems, so may end up rejected.

The supplied helpdata.txt containing help on basic Freeciv concepts -- cities, happiness, production, etc -- and the basic help structure bends over backwards to not be specific to the supplied rulesets, and yet it's still not an ideal reference for any ruleset that departs radically from the norm.

I've been wondering for a while if we should make it possible for keen ruleset authors to replace all (or part) of it with their own helpdata.txt customised to their ruleset.

I've no evidence of demand for this feature, it's just something that's occurred to me while rewriting the default helpdata.txt.

The main problem with this idea is that the ruleset is on the server but helpdata.txt is on the client. So the association would require downloading a client-side modpack (perhaps not a problem for the kind of full-service modpack we're talking about -- probably if it has its own help, it has its own tileset as well), and the server would need to at most hint at its location, similar to "preferred_tileset".

I'm nervous of sending helpdata.txt over the network from the server -- quite apart from being big, it would likely end up localised in the server language rather than the client language. Even if we supply the msgids over the network, that would lead to poor user experience in the default case where client and server versions were different and help text changed in a minor way between them -- client would see some paragraphs not localised.

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